Tangled Threat (Mills & Boon Heroes)

by Heather Graham

  Flannery nodded grimly.

  “Lydia had told a young woman she was working with—Katie Simmons—that she wanted to take her first days off to drive over and see the History Tree. We’re not just working this alone. I have all kinds of help on this. We do have officers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement out all over—not to mention the help we’ve gotten from our local police departments. I keep feeling like I’m looking at some kind of puzzle with pieces missing—except that the frame is there. Because there was only one thing the girls—or young women—had in common.”

  “They had left or were coming to the Frampton Ranch and Resort,” Brock said.

  He felt a sudden pang deep in his heart or maybe his soul—someplace that really hurt at any rate.

  He glanced over at Flannery. “The four of them are between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine,” he said.

  “Lydia Merkel was—is—twenty-nine. She was at the ranch with friends for her birthday. On the tour, she talked about loving ghost stories—and how excited she was going to be to see the infamous History Tree.”

  Seriously—the tree should have been bulldozed.

  Not fair—the tree wasn’t guilty. Men and women could be guilty; the tree was just a tree—two trees.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” Flannery asked. “I mean, not ha ha funny, just...strange. Maybe ironic. The History Tree is two trees. Entwined. And you’re here—because I asked for you particularly because I knew you were FBI, criminal section—and I’m here. And Miss Maura Antrim is here. We’re all kinds of entwined. And I can’t help but think that we still know the killer—even if twelve years have gone by.”

  “Yep. We’re all tangled together somehow, like that damned tree. And so help me God, this time I really want to have the answers...and to stop the killing,” Brock said quietly.

  “You don’t disagree with me?” Flannery asked him.

  Brock shrugged grimly.

  “But you don’t disagree—you don’t think I’m being far-fetched or anything?” Flannery pressed.

  “No, I just wonder what this person—if it is the same killer—has been doing for twelve years,” Brock said. And then added, “Although...maybe he hasn’t been lying dormant. It’s a big state filled with just about everything in one area or another. Forests, marshes, caverns, sinkholes, the Everglades—a river of grass—and, of course...”

  “That great big old Atlantic Ocean,” Flannery said. “So, there you go. My puzzle. Are there pieces missing? Did the three young ladies who disappeared just run off? Or...”

  “Has someone been killing young women and disposing of corpses over the last twelve years?” Brock finished. He took a deep breath. “All right, I guess I’m going to do a lot of traveling. There will be dozens of people to question again. But I think I’ll start at the library at Frampton ranch.”

  * * *

  ANGIE WAS A late sleeper, something Maura deeply appreciated the next morning. She wanted some on-her-own time.

  She had gotten a lot of great footage for Angie’s internet channel on the tour the night before.

  Martin had ended up loving being on camera—and it had loved him. They were going to do the campfire again that night, get more video and put together all the best parts.

  She’d behaved perfectly normally, even though she was ready to crawl out of her own skin. While on the tour, she’d expected to see Brock materialize again.

  It hadn’t been until the very end that she’d realized he’d been there all along—watching from the shadows, from the background.

  But he’d never approached her. She’d seen him later in the lounge, briefly, when she and Angie walked in after the trek through the woods. He’d been deep in conversation with a slightly older man in a suit—she’d seen him earlier and remembered him vaguely. He was a cop of some kind; he’d been there the night that Francine Renault was killed. She had seen him earlier in the day as well, walking around the ranch with a woman. Maura hadn’t seen the woman’s face, just the cut of her suit, and for some bizarre reason she had noticed the woman’s shoes. Flat, serviceable.

  And she’d thought that perhaps the woman was a cop or in some form of law enforcement, too.

  Angie hadn’t seemed interested in talking to any of them—Maura had been glad. She’d left Angie in the lounge, waiting for her appointed drink with Mark, and Maura had slipped quickly upstairs, wanting nothing more than to be in her room, alone.

  Once there, she’d lain awake for hours, wondering why something that had happened ages ago still had such an effect on her life—on her.

  Why...Brock McGovern could suddenly walk back into her life and become all that she thought about once again. So easily. Or why she could close her eyes and see the man he had become and know that he was still somehow flawed and perfect, the man to whom she had subconsciously—or even consciously—compared to everyone else she ever met.

  He hadn’t so much as touched her.

  And he hadn’t looked at her as if he particularly liked her. He’d simply wanted her—and Angie—to be safe. Nothing more. Stay with people. He was a law enforcement officer, a Fed. He worked to find those who had turned living, breathing bodies into murdered, decaying bodies—and he tried to keep all men and women from being victims. His job. What he did.

  A job he always knew he wanted.

  She had to stop thinking about him, and that meant she needed to immerse herself in some other activity—research. Books, knowledge, seeking...

  She had always loved the library and archives at the Frampton ranch. One thing Donald Glass did with every property he bought was build and maintain a library with any books and info he had on that property. It was fascinating—much of it had been put on computer through the years, but every little event that had to do with the property was available.

  The hotel manager—solid, ruddy little Fred Bentley—had never shown any interest in the contents of the library.

  Nor, when she’d been alive, had Francine Renault. But the libraries were sacred. No matter what else the very, very rich Donald Glass might be, he loved his history and his libraries, and anyone working for him learned not to mess with them.

  For this, she greatly admired Glass. Not that she knew the man well—he’d left the hands-on management to Francine and Fred when Maura had been working there. And back then, she and Brock had both spent hours in the library—often together—each trying to one-up the other by finding some obscure and curious fact or happening. It was fun to work the weird trivia into their presentations.

  That had been twelve years ago.

  But Brock was suddenly back in her life.

  No, he wasn’t in her life. He just happened to be here at the same time.

  Because a woman had been murdered—and others had disappeared.

  Concentrate... There was a wealth of information before her. Bits and pieces that might offer up something especially unusual for Angie Parsons.

  The library room was comfortable and inviting, filled with leather sofas and chairs, desks, computers—and shelves upon shelves of files and books.

  Donald Glass had acquired an extensive collection; he had books on the indigenous population of the area, starting back somewhere between twelve and twenty thousand years ago. Settlers had arrived before the end of the Pleistocene megafauna era. The Wacissa River—not far away in Jefferson County near the little town of Wacissa—had offered up several animal fossils of the time, and other areas of the state—including Silver Springs, Vero, Melbourne and Devil’s Den—had also offered up proof of man’s earliest time in the area.

  Way back that many thousands of years, there had been a greater landmass and less water, causing animals—and thus hunters—to congregate at pools. Artifacts proving the existence of these hunter-gatherers could be found in countless rivers—and even out into the Gulf of Mexico.

  Mammoths had even
roamed the state.

  By 700 AD, farming had come to the north of Florida. There were many Native American tribes, and many of those were called Creek by the Europeans and spoke the Muskogee language. But by the time the first Frampton put down roots to create this great ranching and farming estate, Florida Indians of many varieties—though mostly Creek—were being lumped together as Seminoles, largely divided into two groups: the Muskogee-speaking and the Hitchiti-speaking.

  There were wonderful illustrated books describing fossils and tools found, creating images of the people and the way they lived.

  According to the one she pulled from the shelf there had been a colony of Seminole living in the area when Frampton first chose his site.

  They had held rites out at what was already a giant clearing in the forest. It was the Native Americans who had first called it the History Tree. The Timucua had first named it so; the Seminoles in the area had respected the holiness of the tree.

  Maura—like the writer of the book—didn’t believe that the Native American tribes had practiced human sacrifice at the tree. But as war loomed with the Seminole tribe, the European populace had liked to portray the native people as barbarians—it made it easier to justify killing them.

  So the tree had gotten its reputation very early on.

  Gyselle—who became known as Gyselle Frampton, since no one knew her real surname—had arrived at the plantation soon after it was built in the late 1830s. Spanish missionaries had “rescued” her from the Seminole, but she was fifteen at the time and had been kidnapped at the age of ten—or that was the best that could be figured. Oliver Frampton—creator of the first great mansion to rest on the property—had been a kind man. He’d taken her in, clothed her, educated her and had still, of course, given her chores to do.

  She was a servant and not of the elite. She was not, in any way, wife material for his son.

  That hadn’t stopped Richard Frampton from falling in love with his father’s beautiful servant/ward.

  But Richard had underestimated his wife. Back then, a wife was supposed to be a lovely figurehead, wealthy to match her husband and eye candy on the arm of her man. Unless she was very, very, very rich—and then it wouldn’t matter if she was eye candy or not.

  But Julie LeBlanc Frampton had been no fool and not someone to be taken lightly.

  She discovered the affair—and knew that her husband loved Gyselle deeply. Perhaps she was angry with her father-in-law for not only condoning the affair but perhaps finding it to be fine and natural. Wives weren’t supposed to get in the way of these things after all.

  Or maybe the situation was just convenient for her plan.

  She hid the taste of the deadly fruit of the manchineel tree in a drink—one that Gyselle usually made up for the senior Mr. Frampton right before he went to bed made up of whiskey, tea and sugar.

  The old man died in horrible pain. Julie immediately pointed the finger at Gyselle.

  She created such an outcry and hysteria that the other servants immediately went for poor Gyselle. The master had been well loved. And without trial or even much questioning, they had dragged Gyselle out to the History Tree—thought to surely be haunted at that time and also a place where the devil might well be found.

  Gyselle died swearing that she was innocent—and cursing Julie, those around her and even the tree.

  After she was hanged, she was allowed to remain there until she rotted, until her bones fell to the ground.

  Three years later, Julie Frampton died. At the time no one knew what her ailment was—tuberculosis, it sounded like to Maura.

  But in the end, the true poisoner did die choking on her own blood—and confessing to the entire room that she had murdered her father-in-law.

  “Maura!”

  She had become so involved in what she was reading that the sound of her name made her jump.

  She’d been very comfortable in one of the plush leather chairs, feet curled beneath her, the book—Truth and Legends of Central Florida—in her arms.

  Luckily, she didn’t drop it or throw it as she was startled. It was an original book, printed and bound in 1880.

  “Mr. Glass!” she exclaimed, truly started to see the resort’s owner. He usually kept to himself; Fred Bentley was his mouthpiece.

  She quickly closed the book and stood, accepting the hand he offered to her.

  Donald Glass, in his early sixties now, Maura thought, was still an attractive man. He kept himself lean and fit—and had maintained a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. His posture was straight; his manners tended to be impeccable. He’d never personally fired anyone that she knew of, in any of his enterprises. He left managers—like Fred Bentley—to do such deeds. He was customarily well liked and treated kindly by magazines when he was included in an article.

  Donald Glass used his money to make more money, granted. That was the American way. But he did it all in one of the best possible manners—preserving history and donating to worthy causes all the while.

  Whether he was into the causes or simply into tax breaks, no one really looked too closely.

  But he tended to do good things and do them well.

  “Miss Antrim, how lovely to have you here again,” he said, smiling. “And I’m delighted that you’ve brought Angie Parsons with her incredible ability to show the world interesting places—and provide wonderful publicity for those places!”

  “I’d love to take the credit, Mr. Glass,” Maura told him. “Angie heard the story about the History Tree. She couldn’t wait to come.”

  “Well, however you came to be here, I’m most delighted. Still sorry—and I will be sorry all my life—about Francine. She was...”

  He paused. Maura wondered what he’d been about to say. That Francine Renault had been a good woman? But she really hadn’t been kind or generous in any way.

  “No one deserved to die that way,” he said. “Anyway...I did consider having the tree torn out of the ground. But I thought on it a long time and decided that it was the History Tree. They didn’t burn down the building when a famous woman died in a room at the Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida, and...” Again, he paused. “I decided that the tree—or trees—should stay. Not to mention the fact that the environmentalists and preservationists would create a real uproar if we were to cut it down. It’s hundreds of years old, you know. And yes—as you learned last night, we do tell the story at the campfire and continue the walk by the tree.”

  “Trees aren’t evil,” Maura said.

  She wondered if she was trying to reassure him—or if it was something she said but doubted somewhere in a primal section of her heart or mind.

  “No, of course not. A tree is a tree. Or trees are trees,” he said and smiled weakly. “Anyway, I’m delighted to see you. And thankful for the work you’re doing here with Miss Parsons.”

  “I’m not sure you need us. You’ve always had a full house here.”

  He didn’t argue.

  “I’m sure Marie will be delighted to see you, too.”

  “A pleasure to see her,” Maura murmured.

  Marie was perhaps ten years younger than her husband; they had been together for thirty years or so. Like her husband she kept herself fit, and she was an attractive and cordial woman. Her public manner was pristine—every once in a while, Maura had wondered what she was really thinking.

  Glass lifted a hand in farewell and said, “Enjoy your stay.” He started to walk away and then turned back. “I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but...be careful. I’m sure you heard. Remains were found nearby. And several young women have disappeared, as well. Whether they ran away or...met with bad things... I know you’re smart, but...be wary.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard. And I’ll be careful,” Maura said.

  She watched him for a moment as he headed out of the room and then she opened the book again. Words swam before her as
she tried to remember where she’d left off.

  She heard Glass speaking again and she looked toward the door, thinking that he had something else to say.

  But he wasn’t speaking to her.

  Brock was at the doorway, his tone deep and quiet as he replied to whatever Glass had said.

  The length of Maura’s body gripped with tension, which angered her to no end.

  She hadn’t seen or heard from him in twelve years.

  He and Glass parted politely.

  Brock headed straight for her. He smiled, but it seemed that his smile was grave.

  His face seemed harder than the image of him she’d held in her mind. Naturally. Years did that to anyone.

  And he’d always wanted to be law enforcement. But that job had to take a toll.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” he said softly.

  “Yes, well, I...I’m here,” she said.

  She didn’t invite him to sit. He did anyway. She wondered if he was going to talk about the years between them, ask what she’d been doing, maybe even explain why he’d just disappeared after the charges against him had been dismissed.

  Elbows on his knees, hands folded idly, he was close—too close, she thought. Or not really close at all. Just close because she could feel a strange rush inside, as if she knew everything about him, or everything that mattered. She knew his scent—his scent, not soap or aftershave or cologne, but that which lurked beneath it, particular to him, something that drew her to him, that called up a natural reaction within her. She knew that there was a small scar on the lower side of his abdomen—stitches from a deep cut received when he’d fallen on a haphazardly discarded tin can during a track event when he’d been in high school. She knew there was a spattering of freckles on his shoulders, knew...

  “You really shouldn’t be here—you need to pack up and go,” he said. His tone was harsh, as if she were committing a grave sin by being there.

  She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d slapped her.

  “I beg your pardon?” she demanded, a sudden fury taking over.